Don’t try to use these food scraps

May 10, 2021 by
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Cookbooks like Cooking with Scraps by Lindsay Jean-Hard, Scraps, Wilt & Weeds by Mads Refslund and Tama Matsuoka Wong, and the forthcoming Cook More, Waste Less by Christine Tizzard all address the issue of combatting food waste by making use of things you would normally discard. These items include carrot and other vegetable tops, fruit and vegetable peels, and aquafaba, to name just a few. The goal of reducing food waste (and therefore your carbon footprint) is laudable, but there are some scraps that you shouldn’t eat, according to the website Well + Good.

Some foods contain compounds that can make you sick, like rhubarb leaves, which contain oxalic acid (known to cause kidney stones) and apple cores and cherry pits, which have trace amounts of a cyanide compound. While you would have to eat a lot of apple seeds or cherry pits to become ill, it is better to err on the safe side. While I had heard about those items before, I had not known that mango skins contained urushiol – the same chemical that is found in poison ivy and which can give you a nasty skin irritation.

The article lists a handful of other scraps to avoid. The good news is that the list of potentially unsafe items is short and you can find a use for almost all of the peels, leafy tops, and other scraps. I recently learned that if you freeze bananas in their skins for use in banana bread, you can whizz the whole thing up in the food processor and use the entire banana. I just tossed some seriously speckled fruit into the freezer for just that purpose.

Category: Antipasto

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6 Comments

  • colin.purrington  on  May 11, 2021

    The entire banana?!

    • Jane  on  May 12, 2021

      The Washington Post recently had a recipe for banana bread using the whole banana (apologies if the recipe is behind a paywall for you). I have also added the recipe to the EYB Library. You cut off the ends and freeze the bananas for at least 8 hours, then defrost for at least 3 hours. I’m going to try it!

  • averythingcooks  on  May 11, 2021

    Having planted Virginia Creeper along a fence to provide a wall of green, I have discovered that I am VERY allergic to the oxalic acid crystals (same stuff in rhubarb leaves) contained in the leaves. If I brush bare skin across any broken/damaged leaves, the result is a painful, weeping (sorry!) rash that only responds to a prescription corticosteroid. My partner has pulled & dug it out by the roots 3 years in a row…..and it comes back beautifully every spring/ summer, doing exactly the thing I planted it to do.

  • Fyretigger  on  May 11, 2021

    averythingcooks, I had a horrible infestation of oxcalis years ago. It’s very difficult to get all the root system. A local nursery told me how to deal with it. Keep it under control during the growing season, so it doesn’t spread more, then in the fall, spray the foliage with a narrow spectrum herbicide. The herbicide will be drawn into the root system as the plants prepare for winter and kill it. I had to do this 2 years in a row, but then the oxcalis did not come back.

  • averythingcooks  on  May 11, 2021

    Fyretigger – big thank you for the suggestion….we will give it a try.

  • SerenaYLee  on  May 16, 2021

    Re cyanide in cherry pits and apple cores – bitter almonds that are used to make almond extract (and is responsible for its distinct smell) also have trace amounts of cyanide in it, which is why they have been banned for sale here in the US. (Hence the claim that cyanide smells like almonds). However to my knowledge, bitter almonds are still used in places like Sicily, where they are featured prominently in a lot of the baked goods and confectionaries there. I am not a medical/scientific expert when I say this, but I have heard that inorganic cyanide as that found in pesticides is a far greater health concern than the organic cyanide found in fruits and nuts.

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